A history of racial exclusion

By Hussein Rashid

Published
6:50 pm EDT, Friday, June 29, 2018

The Supreme Court's ruling on President Donald Trump's travel ban against several Muslim-majority countries is not surprising.

The court is never immune to its surroundings on Capitol Hill, and historically, as long as the people support its decisions, the court has ruled in favor of discrimination. As to welcoming them to the United States, the court almost never acts for the rights promised in the Constitution without first denying them.

In Ozawa v. United States in 1922, the court, citing the Naturalization Act of 1906, refused a Japanese-born man citizenship on the grounds that he was not white. The next year, in the Thind decision, the court effectively stripped Indian-Americans of citizenship. Bhagat Singh Thind had argued from a scientific viewpoint Indians and Caucasians were of the same race; the court chose what it called a "common-sense" definition of whiteness.

In Korematsu vs. United States, the court ruled that sending Japanese-American citizens to internment camps for the duration of World War II was legal. The decision said the president could target a group of people based on a defining characteristic and imprison them for national security reasons.

This is the same passion for expediency in racial classification that has allowed citizens of five Muslim-majority nations to be prevented from traveling to the United States (out of seven countries included in the ban). Though Islam is a faith, and Muslims make up one of the most racially diverse religions in the world and the United States, Muslims have been "racialized."

This perception of Muslims as a racial community was revived by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and on 9/11, which instilled an idea of Muslims as a foreign threat and brown-skinned. But the confusion goes back to the United States' beginnings, when Muslims were often referred to as Turks — members of a horde that threatened white Europe from the East. The racialization of Muslims is visible in the way many Americans tend to regard anyone from South Asia or the Arab world as Muslim. Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims are often the targets of anti-Muslim hate crimes.

Muslims fit into the larger pattern of American racial exclusion, on which the justices' record is not good: The Dred Scott decision in 1857 ruled human beings are property; Plessy vs. Ferguson, in 1896, established the notion of "separate but equal." As a Muslim, I've been taught an important religious principle: repentance. When we make a error, especially one that hurts someone, we are charged with apologizing, then turning away from the behavior.

As an American, I know we spend a lot of time saying "sorry" for our racism, but we have not repented from it. To free ourselves from it, we need to repent, we need to remember, and we need to recreate how we see ourselves.

Until then, the Supreme Court will continue to legitimize racist laws and presidential statements.